Downtown San Mateo

A little history

San Mateo began as a Catholic mission outpost in the 1790s and grew slowly as a stage stop halfway between San Francisco and San Jose. What turned it into a town was the railroad. In 1863, under Charles B. Polhemus, a director of the new San Francisco to San Jose line, the first train reached San Mateo, making the run from the city in just thirty-seven minutes. The station came first, buildings rose around Main Street and Railroad Avenue, and by the 1880s brick storefronts lined the square by the tracks. Downtown was born at B Street and Third Avenue, and that is still its heart today.

For decades, South B Street was where San Mateo shopped: pharmacies, meat markets, groceries, cigar stores, hardware and lumber. Much of it went up thanks to the Wisnom family, pioneer builders who ran a lumber yard here from the 1880s and whose name is still on several downtown buildings. The old Wisnom Hotel on Second Avenue, built in 1900 and renamed the Hotel St. Matthew in 1920, is the last downtown hotel of its era still standing. The 1891 Odd Fellows Hall on B Street, home to the city's oldest fraternal order, is one of the oldest buildings left.

As East Third Avenue filled in through the 1920s and 1930s, San Mateo became a booming San Francisco suburb. At one point newspapers claimed 85 percent of locals commuted to the city, and downtown took on the Spanish Colonial and Art Deco look it still wears. The showpiece was the House of Merkel at 201 South B Street, an Art Deco landmark where German immigrants Carl and Cuna Merkel ran a cigar store, soda fountain, confectionary, billiard parlor, and even horse betting, a gathering place for over fifty years. A few blocks over, the eight-story Benjamin Franklin Hotel opened in 1927 as a resort for vacationing San Franciscans.

Downtown has layers most people walk right past. The old City Hall at 215 South B Street served from 1914 to 1961 and still hides a judge's chamber upstairs and a prison cell and rifle range in the basement. In the 1920s, 139 South B Street was Noah's Cafeteria, run by one of the first known Black businessmen in San Mateo. When Hillsdale's mall opened in the 1950s, anchor stores like J.J. Newberry drifted south, and that quiet exodus is part of what preserved downtown's 1930s character. A walk down B Street and Third today still conjures the town San Mateo used to be.